VIDEO GAME: One Gun Guy (2022)

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One Gun GuyYear: 2022Rating: E10+Time Played: 24 minutes / 0.4 hours I picked up One Gun Guy for free the other day because I thought it looked like a fun little platformer. While it was quite short for a play-through on my SteamDeck, I enjoyed myself. There are several influences that clearly went into this game, most all of which are from well-known retro games. This combination of influences made it worth the hour I spent on it. I might come back to it at some point and play again, but the initial play-through was worth it. Like many of the retro games One Gun Guy is based on, there’s not a ton of reasoning behind why this guy is running through a robot factory and shooting all the robots (or collecting the coins). Still, the shooting mechanic felt reminiscent of Mega Man, which I enjoyed. The real fun comes in all the upgrades you can get to make it easier to...
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MOVIE: A Complete Unknown (2024)

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A Complete UnknownYear: 2024Rating: RLength: 141 minutes / 2.35 hours While there have been plenty of biopics about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown (2024) had the benefit of James Mangold directing it. As a director, he’s had a good string of iconic and critically acclaimed movies, including the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line (2005). Since Mangold clearly knew how to make a movie about a famous musician, the same held true here. Unfortunately, the problem with musician biopics is that these individuals tend to have a major flaw that makes them completely insufferable. Most of the time, drugs are the weak spot of musicians like Ray Charles in Ray (2004) or the aforementioned Johnny Cash. In A Complete Unknown, success is Dylan’s kryptonite. I appreciated the background and development of the folk music culture in the first half of this movie, but because Dylan’s talent as a musician and songwriter gave him enough success to do what he wanted, he let...
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BOOK: The Well of Ascension (2007)

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The Well of AscensionYear: 2007Author: Brandon SandersonLength: 1,737 minutes / 28.95 hours Even though it has been some time since I read The Final Empire, it is a testament to Brandon Sanderson that I could remember most of the details of this fantasy series when I got to the second book, The Well of Ascension. The magic system of burning different metals to provide a variety of super-powered abilities is such a unique idea that it easily sticks in my mind and is complex enough to explore further in this book. While I love how Sanderson does his action sequences, I understand the need to lean more on political and religious intrigue in this second book to deepen the lore and world-building for the Mistborn series. Sanderson does a good job with these moments of loyalty and betrayal, and it shows the amount of thought he put into making this world realistic—at least in terms of how we understand our world’s politics...
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MOVIE: Rio (2011)

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RioYear: 2011Rating: GLength: 96 minutes / 1.67 hours When Rio (2011) came out, I felt it was pushed into so many aspects of popular culture that 20th Century Fox Animation was trying to make it a hit by sheer cross-branding. Heck, there was even an entire Angry Birds game made for mobile phones that was filled with plot from the movie. Re-watching this film more than a decade later made me realize how generic this movie truly is. That it had so many trope similarities to Fox Animation’s Epic (2013) which came out a few years later, shows how formulaic these movies are. It seems every movie dealing with rare animals always has some kind of poacher as the villain. Finding Nemo (2003) did this. Madagascar 3 (2012) did this. Migration (2023) did this. Additionally, most movies set in “foreign” locales play up their cultural touchstones as a strong bit of advertising to the tourists who might watch the movie (or at...
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VIDEO GAME: The Legend of Zelda – Echoes of Wisdom (2024)

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The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of WisdomYear: 2024Rating: E10+Time Played: ~20 hours With the recent successes of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I started to wonder if the top-down Zelda titles were now a thing of the past. Sure, the remake of Link’s Awakening looked awesome, but it wasn’t really an original idea. Enter Echoes of Wisdom, the first Zelda game to feature the titular princess as the main character (CD-i games notwithstanding). I was glad that Nintendo took a risk here to develop something new, even if the execution sometimes left more to be desired. While Echoes of Wisdom holds the player’s hand perhaps a little more than the recent 3D games, it still feels like the map has the open-world freedom of these larger games in the franchise. There are problems, and as Zelda progresses through the game, she finds “echoes” of enemies and objects to solve those problems. Of course, with so many different things...
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MOVIE: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

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The Island of Dr. Moreau Year: 1996 Rating: PG-13 Length: 96 minutes / 1.60 hours As a fan of H.G. Wells’ works, I was intrigued by the negative reception The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) received in this latest film adaptation of the novel of the same name. Surely it couldn’t be as bad as everyone says it was? Having obtained the Director’s Cut of the movie on DVD, I finally found an evening to sit down and watch it and can confirm it was pretty bad. Not so bad it’s good, but that’s the problem. For a movie that had both the up-and-coming Val Kilmer and the respected titan Marlon Brando, it’s weird that both actors play such minor roles in this film. Of course, if you read more about the troubled production, you’ll know why the result is a bit of a mess. But ignoring these behind-the-scenes facts, it’s difficult to watch this movie and wonder what the point of it all was....
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BOOK: Relational Masks (2004)

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Relational MasksYear: 2004Author: Russell WillinghamLength: 192 pages Relationships are hard. Sure, once you have communication down, they become easier. However, there are subconscious traumas from our developmental years that will affect how we interact with others for the rest of our lives. These are the things that impede us honestly and intimately communicating with others to build those relationships. While not necessarily a guide on how to fix these traumas, Relational Masks does a great job of identifying the core beliefs that influence how we put barriers between others and our vulnerable selves. While I understand that many of these “categorization” philosophies (like Meyers-Briggs, 5 Love Languages, etc.) aren’t great at identifying growth areas, I appreciate how they can be something to point to for self-identification. Relational Masks certainly has a categorical set of coping techniques to keep ourselves at arm’s length from those we hold close. Each of these “masks” is a bit of a spectrum of how strongly it affects...
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MOVIE: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)

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Sonic the Hedgehog 3Year: 2024Rating: PGLength: 110 minutes / 1.83 hours One thing that initially struck me about the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movies was how much lore could be extracted from the video games (especially the 16-bit ones). With Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) being a bit of an origin story movie for Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and Robotnik (Jim Carrey), Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) easily added two iconic characters from the second and third games in the series. Then there’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024). The lore is at its deepest in this chapter and was a logical next step in Sonic’s story. When Sonic made the jump from 2-D platformer to 3-D space, there was a bit of a learning curve for the series. While I’ll probably have to write another review of Sonic Adventure 2, that this movie made a mostly clean adaptation of this game’s plot is a big positive. With the introduction of Shadow (Keanu Reeves)—the series’...
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